Just a Little Further
by Wanderlustlover
Summary: Just a little further.        The great planting.


"_Can we rest now?"_

Faraday stepped back from the rampart blowing her bangs up. She hadn't been to this place in years. She hadn't even remembered this place for years. And now she was filled with memories she'd willingly given up, even rejoiced in giving it all up; good and bad.

She had given up the memories of her betrayal from Axis. She'd given up the torture. She'd given up the child, who loved her, needed her, but from its first breath was Axis incarnate. She gave up being used as pawn in many games. She gave up being mother to the replanted forests of her world, though, which the world had been reborn.

"_Just a little further now and then you can rest."_

The life of a creature of nature and the cares of that creature had been all she'd known for many cycles of the earth. The warmth of the spring, the sweetness of greening grass, the creation of her children and the protection of their children and their childrens children, where to hide and sleep in the winter, and where to run and frolic in the summer. She would not be welcome in the place she thought of as home and she was very welcome in a place she relegated to a personal hell.

Now she walked the footsteps of the woman she'd forgotten, looked away from the looks she could now remember, abandoned those who gave her reverence with confusion, and wandered in silence feeling trapped by the sounds of single human voices. And in her heart, she still felt the thrust of the knife when Axis or Azhure looked into her eyes and asked her if she was alright.

"_My feet are sore and my back is breaking." _

It wasn't as if they'd even meant to release her. They'd come searching for her now and then in the forest and she'd come closer feeling some safety or run remembering some jarring emotion, not that either made more sense than the other to a forest creature. She wondered what terrible task and ordeal they were waiting to put her through now.

The diaphaneity of this gown, and the integument of her shoes, compared to the spring that faded in and out of her thoughts, were like chains and anchors on her soul. And so she walked alone, apart from all of them, hazarding words like each were a riddle. She walked among them but apart from them. A powerful and proclaimed presence that none would brook.

"_Just a little further now and then you can rest."_

She watched the boy, DragonStar, as her was yelled at and spat upon below her by one of the many. He struck as one of the few who'd understood her. He waited on her with hungry, angry eyes, but made no move to display his anger toward her, in fact he seemed as distant and outcast as she in his own way. She had no place for love or friendship though; she had been scorned and burned by both. And yet her eyes lingered on him, till his head rose to seek his watcher, and she looked away.

Lessons there must be that she still needed to learn she deduced among the silence of her own voices and that of those who surrounded her in cacophony. She longed to run to her forest but in this body her family and her friends would not know her, not know and fear this human scent that invaded their domain, no matter how silent she walked or how long she sat waiting.

"_I am tired and the path before me is so long."_

But what would this hold for her that it had not tried to break her of before? Was there a reason for true hope, the loyalty of friendship and the fiery passion that was love? She did not know what could lay before her on this path, this future that caused her to shiver with trepidation of what was coming. But though she shivered, she looked out over the rampart, daring it to think that it could best her even now.

Faraday -who had been Queen of Achar, was the mother of a the Mage-King of the Avar, the Tree Friend, the creator of the Minstrelsea, the one being to survive shattering under the power of the Rainbow Scepter and to still live, been a deer of forest and was still just the woman she was born – breathed a deep breath and girded herself for the coming days ahead of her, and murmured to herself liken to the voice of The Mother in her ears;

"Just a little further now and you can rest."


End file.
